You seem a little pale. Have you taken your vitamins today?

The Club Can’t Even Handle Me Right Now!

As a professional online stalker and certified creep, I’ve read a number of articles (fine, memes) on the introvert-extrovert relationship. And all I have to say to extroverts is this – you poor things. You’ve been declared shallow minded and pointlessly loud as opposed to us profound souls. Meanwhile, we maintain a thoughtful expression and wonder if goats are always high or just weird. But here ends my sympathy for you socially proficient devils. From this point on, I speak solely to the awkward idiot about surviving in his or her worst nightmare – clubs. Like every piece of advice I’ve ever given, it’s based on experience and not for the faint hearted. It’s also utterly useless. But humour me, will you?

Like every normal person, I decided to set foot in a nightclub one Saturday evening. Unlike every normal person, I’d be setting foot in a club for the first time in my life. I was sure I was ready for the experience and I was slightly excited. I should’ve known that excitement was just phase one of many I would go through.

The evening began at home, with a “schoolgirl” skirt (I know, makes me feel icky too) and some makeup. After all that effort, the world simply had to see me tonight-it would be selfish to stay home and waste all my beauty on Netflix. Personal opinions on that thought are not welcome, thanks.

A hop, skip and a painful walk in high heels later, we were there. While waiting in line to get in, I learnt that fifteen minutes spent washing Nutella off my face didn’t qualify as “effort.” After I got into the club, the joke was on the other ladies- no one could see a thing anyway! I won that round. I didn’t win any after that.

I knew the music would be loud enough to awaken the dead but I wasn’t expecting stunts of any sort from the lights. When I stepped on to the dance floor, I felt I was in a stop-motion video. Was I horrified and craving my blanket? Certainly not. I welcomed the opportunity to explore yet another dimension of my youth. Also, my friends were having way too much fun to take me home.

I was in the club for a grand total of forty five minutes. Of these, I spent forty four on the dance floor and didn’t move a limb. Not even to the beat of the, er, music (?) After repeating “this is so weird” to myself in six different accents, I put my mind to work. There are many things a non-dancer can do on a pulsing dance floor, as it turned out.

It started out boring – I made a list of everything I hadn’t done yet. Once my to-do list was mentally organized in order of priorities and happily forgotten, I started observing my fellow human beings on the dance floor. They seemed delighted to breathe in a hundred others’ sweat and risk serious ankle injury. My kindhearted instincts kicked in and I prepared a quick n’ easy plan of action in the very likely case of an emergency. Most of it involved the ability to manufacture extra oxygen and hold about two hundred girls as their shoes betrayed them, but I had it figured out.

I then moved on to spotting creeps and protecting my friends from them. If the guy in the pineapple t shirt was trying to smile at his friend behind my friend, I needed to glare at him. If the girl with the shrill voice was trying to hug my female friends too tight, I needed to pull her away. If the girl with the shrill voice was one of my female friends, I needed to…apologize. This little hobby was not particularly useless, even though I earned a few enemies by the end of it.

Finally, I decided I would blend in with the crowd if I just sang along with every song the DJ played. I was doing quite well until I was rudely introduced to the concept of cutting songs halfway to make way for beats and the second line of a completely unrelated song. And that was the last thing I did before my blanket craving drove me out of the club.

What should be your key takeaway from this, you ask? If your idea of a fun Saturday is doing the dishes and binge watching terrible comedies, you probably shouldn’t go to a club. Just a thought.

What a nice blog you got there missy! Read a few posts, and boy, you are hilarious or what! Let me tell you that you are the only other Bangalorean I know of (know of?! yea things people claim after reading two posts I tell you) who doesn’t enjoy clubbing either. Anyhow, just dropped by to say, hi 🙂

They ought to build a club for introverts like us. A place where our words matter more than our makeup, and where our humor (or humour, if you like) is prized more than our outfits. We could connect via the internet instead of the bar, have tiny pictures represent ourselves, choose our own names, and talk to each other via conversations we call “posts,” typed in the privacy of our own homes. And we will call this club Beautiful Living Off the Grid, or, if you’re a fan of acronyms, BLOG. Yes, that’s it! I think I may have stumbled onto something great…

…like your blog post, which describes almost every social moment of my life. Introverts Unite! Awkwardly!